Living Books about Life: Symbiosis

Together with Pete Woodbridge, I have edited a living book in the excellent new Open Humanities Press book series Living Books about Life, edited by Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall. Our edited book, entitled Symbiosis: Ecologies, Assemblages and Evolution, brings together openly available science and humanities articles on symbiosis, complemented by videos, podcasts and images that further illustrate the topic. The books are all fully editable and ready for you to reuse, complement and re-contextualise. You can find the book here.

From the introduction:

We should stress that this living book is also a symbiotic book. It is a merging and co-habitation of different media-species, a mash-up of text and video, sound and images, pixels and living, material tissue. The digital medium has in many ways made it possible for the book to become increasingly infected with foreign (non-textual) elements as it evolves into something different; into a becoming which might even lead to the disappearance of the book as we currently know it and to the rise of a new symbiotic book-evolved hybrid species.

In this context this symbiotic book on symbiosis also constitutes a tool for a critique which is directed at visions of the book which position it as a static, stable entity, a lifeless thing made out of dead trees. As a concept the symbiotic book argues for the book as becoming, as infinitely transforming and interacting and crossing over into other books and other discourses, a machinic assemblage of various discrete media entities, all of them interconnected. In this vision the networked, liquid books in the Living Books About Life series form an ecology of information, one that grows stronger and expands in mutual cooperation. Cooperation as books, as ‘lifeless entities’, or non-organic matter, also takes places with and via the living, with the human assemblages who create the books, feed into them, and make them part of the networks through which they algorithmically spread over the web, keeping the book alive, keeping it social.

The symbiotic book crosses boundaries, between the life sciences and the humanities, but also between the scholarly world and society at large, thus making it open for infection, for re-use, for remixing and change. The symbiotic book still has borders, though. Evolution is a slow process, heavily influenced by environmental and cultural barriers. Nevertheless, maybe some genetic modification might be beneficial in this respect.

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Open Humanities Press publishes twenty-one open access Living Books About Life

Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and edited by Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall, Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life — with life understood both philosophically and biologically — which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge, said: ‘This book series would not be possible without open access. On the author side, it takes splendid advantage of the freedom to reuse and repurpose open-access research articles. On the other side, it passes on that freedom to readers. In between, the editors made intelligent selections and wrote original introductions, enhancing each article by placing it in the new context of an ambitious, integrated understanding of life, drawing equally from the sciences and humanities’.

By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost, low-tech manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, commented: ‘This remarkable series transforms the humble Reader into a living form, while breaking down the conceptual barrier between the humanities and the sciences in a time when scholars and activists of all kinds have taken the understanding of life to be central. Brilliant in its simplicity and concept, this series is a leap towards an exciting new future’.

One of the most important aspects of the Living Books About Life series is the impact it has had on the attitudes of the researchers taking part, changing their views on open access and raising awareness of issues around publishers’ licensing and copyright agreements. Many have become open access advocates themselves, keen to disseminate this model among their own scholarly and student communities. As Professor Erica Fudge of the University of Strathclyde and co-editor of the living book on Veterinary Science, put it, ‘I am now evangelical about making work publicly available, and am really encouraging colleagues to put things out there’.

These ‘books about life’ are themselves ‘living’, in the sense they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research — together with interactive maps and audio-visual material — into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus involved in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data, iPad apps and e-book readers such as Kindle.

Tara McPherson, editor of VECTORS, Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, said: ‘It is no hyperbole to say that this series will help us reimagine everything we think we know about academic publishing. It points to a future that is interdisciplinary, open access, and expansive.’

Funded by JISC, Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions, Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent.

Open Humanities Press is a non-profit, international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org